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the newspapers, this schoolboy who could neither swim nor ride a bicycle didn't amount to much; but the mine sweeper of the Czaika class, which was later to provide him with his first chance to perform, was already, if only for a few weeks, playing its military role in the Pitziger Wiek, in the Gulf, and in the fishing port of Hela.
    The Polish fleet was small but ambitious. We knew its modern ships, for the most part built in England or France, by heart, and could reel off their guns, tonnage, and speed in knots with never a mistake, just as we could recite the names of all Italian light cruisers, or of all the obsolete Brazilian battleships and monitors.
    Later Mahlke took the lead also in this branch of knowledge; he learned to pronounce fluently and without hesitation the names of the Japanese destroyers from the modern Kasumi class, built in '38, to the slower craft of the Asagao class, modernized in '23: " Fumizuki, Satsuki, Yuuzuki, Hokaze, Nadakaze, and Oite ."
    It didn't take very long to rattle off the units of the Polish fleet. There were the two destroyers, the Blyskawica and the Grom, two thousand tons, thirty-eight knots, but they decommissioned themselves two days before the outbreak of the war, put into English ports, and were incorporated into the British Navy. The Blyskawica is still in existence. She has been converted into a floating naval museum in Gdynia and schoolteachers take their classes to see it.
    The destroyer Burza, fifteen hundred tons, thirty-three knots, took the same trip to England. Of the five Polish submarines, only the Wilk and, after an adventurous journey without maps or captain, the eleven-hundred-ton Orzel succeeded in reaching English ports. The Rys, Zbik, and Semp allowed themselves to be interned in Sweden.
    By the time the war broke out, the ports of Gdynia, Putzig, Heisternest, and Hela were bereft of naval vessels except for an obsolete former French cruiser that served as a training ship and dormitory, the mine layer Gryf, built in the Norman dockyards of Le Havre, a heavily armed vessel of two thousand tons, carrying three hundred mines. Otherwise there were a lone destroyer, the Wicker, a few former German torpedo boats, and the six mine sweepers of the Czaika class, which also laid mines. These last had a speed of eighteen knots; their armament consisted of a 75-millimeter forward gun and four machine guns on revolving mounts; they carried, so the official handbooks say, a complement of twenty mines.
    And one of these one-hundred-and-eighty-five-ton vessels had been built specially for Mahlke.
    The naval battle in the Gulf of Danzig lasted from the first of September to the second of October. The score, after the capitulation on Hela Peninsula, was as follows: The Polish units Gryf , Wicker, Baltyk, as well as the three mine sweepers of the Czaika class, the Mewa, the Jaskolka, and the Czapla, had been destroyed by fire and sunk in their ports; the German destroyer Leberecht had been damaged by artillery fire, the mine sweeper M85 ran into a Polish antisubmarine mine north of Heisternest and lost a third of its crew.
    Only the remaining, slightly damaged vessels of the Czaika class were captured. The Zuraw and the Czaika were soon commissioned under the names of Oxth ö ft and Westerplatte; as the third, the Rybitwa, was being towed from Hela to Neufahrwasser, it began to leak, settle, and wait for Joachim Mahlke; for it was he who in the following summer raised brass plaques on which the name Rybitwa had been engraved. Later, it was said that a Polish officer and a bosun's mate, obliged to man the rudder under German guard, had flooded the barge in accordance with the well-known Scapa Flow recipe.
    For some reason or other it sank to one side of the channel, not far from the Neufahrwasser harbor buoy and, though it lay conveniently on one of the many sandbanks, was not salvaged, but spent the rest of the war right there, with only its bridge, the remains of its rail, its